Will The ‘26 Midterms Teach Us Anything?

Please Follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Gettr, Truth Social, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram

Connecticut Republicans didn’t just lose Tuesday -- they got a lesson, and the only question left is whether anybody’s taking notes.

Let’s not dress it up. Tuesday was a wipeout.

Ned Lamont won a third term. With about 98 percent of the expected vote in, NBC’s count had him at 59.6 percent to Ryan Fazio’s 40.4. That’s roughly 248,000 votes. Ryan Fazio was a serious candidate -- a state senator who actually put a tax plan on the table -- and he still lost by close to 20 points.

And folks, the governor’s race was the good news.

In the state Senate, Republicans walked in with 11 seats. They’re walking out with three. Three. Eric Berthel, Henri Martin and Rob Sampson -- and Sampson held on by about 500 votes. The Senate Minority Leader, Stephen Harding, lost his own seat. John Kissel, seventeen terms, gone. Heather Somers, gone. Jeff Gordon, gone. The 28th District, a seat Republicans held for 50 years, went to Rob Blanchard -- yes, that Rob Blanchard, the governor’s former communications guy -- by 22 points. In the House, Republicans lost 14 seats and will be outnumbered more than three to one, with a couple of recounts still pending.

Mark Pazniokas at the CT Mirror, who’s watched this building longer than most of the people in it, called it “a near extinction event.” He’s not wrong. Three Republicans out of 36 senators has never happened in Connecticut.

All five House seats stayed Democratic. Chris Lancia, the Republican in the 3rd, got about 36 percent against Rosa DeLauro, according to the AP numbers he posted. And the party still hasn’t won a statewide or congressional race in Connecticut in 20 years.

So, Tuesday. Here’s the thing. Losing is not the sin. Everybody loses. The sin is losing and learning nothing.

Let’s start where everybody else is starting. Ben Proto.

Proto’s been the state party chairman since 2021. Re-elected in 2023 and again in 2025. And from the beginning, the goal he set was simple: elect a Republican governor in 2026. That didn’t happen. That’s not me being mean. That’s the scoreboard.

The knives were out before the coffee was cold Wednesday. Leora Levy -- the party’s 2022 U.S. Senate nominee, a former national committeewoman, endorsed by Trump -- went on X and said Proto “should resign in disgrace.” She asked, “Where was the CTGOP GOTV effort?” She said there was “no Early Voting Campaign to get our voters out, no unified statewide rallies, no CTGOP mailers,” and “no texts, nothing!”

Proto told Connecticut Public on election night he intends to finish his term. That’s up in June.

Now, in fairness -- and I want to be fair here -- Pazniokas also made the point that party chairs have limited influence over legislative candidates, who are largely picked by the legislative caucus leaders. That’s true. A chairman doesn’t pick the guy running in your district. He doesn’t knock your door for you.

But that’s exactly why the next piece matters.

Chris Lancia ran for Congress in the 3rd District on, by his own count, about $15,000. Fifteen thousand dollars, against an incumbent who had raised $11 million by the end of June.

And then Ben Proto texted him. After the election. Asked him to call.

Lancia wrote him back. I’m going to clean up a couple of words, because this is Sunday.

“Ben, you and State Central didn’t do a thing for my campaign, so what exactly do you expect me to talk to you about?” he wrote. “As far as I’m concerned, you should resign.”

He said he’d worked 18 months and raised about $15,000. Then: “Imagine what I could have accomplished with some actual support from the state party.” And the line that should sting: “Every time you went on television, all I heard about was the Fifth Congressional District. What about the rest of us?”

“Where was the fundraising? Where was the organization? Where was the leadership?” He said other frustrated candidates were saying the same thing. “Politically, I believe it’s time for you to resign.” And he was done, he wrote, with “this little club.”

That’s not a vague complaint about “the party.” That’s a congressional nominee telling the chairman, by name, to resign.

Lancia said some of this in public, too. He put out a statement that should be taped to the wall of every Republican Town Committee in this state.

“We have a lot of Republican Town Committees (RTCs) that didn’t do a damn thing to help their candidates,” he wrote. He said there were “party leaders who wouldn’t walk alongside certain candidates or knock on doors with them simply because they didn’t like the way those candidates spoke or carried themselves.”

And then this. “Out of 27 RTCs in my district, maybe eight or nine actually stepped up and wanted to help. Think about that for a minute.”

I did think about it. Eight or nine out of 27. That’s not a party. That’s a guest list.

Lancia’s not new to this argument, either. Back in 2021, when Proto and Lancia were the two announced candidates for state chairman, Lancia said communication was the problem -- “the lack of communication between the boots on the ground” and the state party. He talked about social media, software, canvassing, digital ads. Five years later he’s on a Facebook post saying, “Republicans are their own worst enemies. We eat our own alive, and then we wonder why we keep losing.”

Here’s what I’ll say about Ben Proto. I’m not going to tell you what’s in his heart. I don’t know it. But when your former Senate nominee, your congressional candidates, and your grassroots are all telling you the same thing -- nobody’s helping, nobody’s organizing, nobody’s listening -- at some point it stops being “a few malcontents.” At some point it’s the message.

And it’s not even new. Last year, Selina Rifkin of the CT Common Sense Podcast wrote an open letter to every State Central member and to the chairman. She said “many of us in CT feel like no one in the CT GOP is listening.” She said people throw around the phrase “country club.” That was September of 2025. Fourteen months before the wipeout.

So when people ask, what did we learn? Some of us already knew.

Now let’s talk about enthusiasm.

Two weeks before the election, Proto himself told CT News Junkie, “Republicans tend to be Election Day voters.” Over the first three days of early voting, registered Democrats had cast 62,555 ballots. Republicans had cast 18,766. Now, there are more Democrats on the rolls -- about 802,000 to about 486,000. But that’s not three to one. And the biggest group in the state, about 934,000 people, isn’t registered with either party.

Look, that’s the whole ballgame right there. Republicans can’t win Connecticut with Republicans. Never could. You win it with the unaffiliated guy in Wethersfield who’s mad about his electric bill and doesn’t care what letter is next to your name. And you don’t reach that guy by showing up on Election Day and hoping.

Enthusiasm isn’t yelling louder at the people who already agree with you. Enthusiasm is the thing that makes you call your brother-in-law. Your neighbor. The lady at church. And you can’t convince anybody of anything if you can’t stand being in a room with them.

That’s the part we keep missing. Your neighbor who voted for Lamont is not your enemy. He’s a guy who didn’t hear a better offer. Talk to him. Respectfully. You might be surprised.

Which brings me to the message. Or the lack of one.

Quick question. Who’s the face of the Connecticut Republican Party right now? Go ahead. I’ll wait.

The Senate leader lost. There’s no Republican in Congress from here. No statewide office. Fazio ran a real campaign, and he’s said he’s not going anywhere -- good. But a party can’t be one guy every four years. Democrats have a bench. They have a story. They have a governor who goes on TV with a cup of coffee and says, “We cut middle class taxes. We’re saving you $400 a year on electric bills.”

And that’s the thing. That message worked.

Let’s be honest about what the Lamont pitch was this year. Back in February he wanted a $200 rebate check -- $200 a person, $400 a couple -- landing in October, days before the election. Even the CT Mirror reported critics calling it a reelection gimmick. The legislature didn’t go for it, and the money got redirected to the towns. Fine. So the pitch became: property tax help through towns, about $300 million more for his preschool endowment, free child care for 3- and 4-year-olds for families under $100,000 in coming years, bigger sales tax holiday, tax-free backpacks, free school breakfast.

Every one of those things is a gift with somebody else’s name on the receipt. And it works. People like getting things. I like getting things.

Meanwhile, Fazio and the Senate Republicans put up the biggest tax cut package of the session -- about $1.5 billion a year back to households. It went nowhere. And the guy who blocked the big cuts ran as the affordability candidate. Think about that.

Now here’s the part they don’t put in the coffee ad. People keep leaving. The Census Bureau’s own estimates say Connecticut lost a net 5,945 people to other states between July 2024 and June 2025. Since April 2020, the net domestic loss is 27,919. The state’s population is growing, sure -- but CTData says that’s on international migration, and the domestic outflow is heaviest out of southwestern Connecticut. Fairfield County. The folks who write the biggest checks to Hartford.

So you’ve got a governor handing out backpacks while families pack the U-Haul. And he won by 19. That’s not a knock on the voters. That’s a knock on us, for not making the other side of that ledger impossible to ignore.

Which is the last lesson, and maybe the biggest.

How do you make the argument if nobody hears it?

Here in Connecticut, the media landscape doesn’t exactly lean our way. I’ve stood in those press conferences. You know how the questions go. And when somebody does ask the hard one, the governor’s office calls them a “faux journalist.” We covered that last week.

So we’ve got to build it ourselves. Not complain about it. Build it.

That’s why I started CharterOakNews.com -- CONN -- two weeks ago. It’s a front page. The Connecticut stories that matter, every one linked back to whoever reported it. It’s not the answer by itself. But it’s one more door that’s open. And we need a hundred more. Podcasts in Waterbury. A Facebook page in Enfield that actually posts. Town committees that know how to make a video. Candidates who don’t need permission from a newspaper to be heard.

Lancia was saying that in 2021. Software, social media, digital. Rifkin was saying it in 2025. Five years. How many more do we need?

Because the other side figured out the message. Short, warm, and paid for by you. We’ve got the better argument -- people are leaving, the bills are too high, and nobody in Hartford is answering for it. But the better argument with no microphone is just a guy talking to himself in the car.

So here we are. Republicans lost eight Senate seats, 14 House seats, every statewide race and every House race. We’re going to hear a lot about lessons this winter. Committees. Post-mortems. Reports.

But here’s my question, and I mean it. No matter what we learn from Tuesday -- about the chairman, about the town committees, about turnout, about the message, about the microphone -- will we listen? Even when the lessons are hard? Even when the lesson is about us?

Because if we don’t, we’ll be right back here in two years, saying the same things, wondering why.

Losing is how you learn. But only if you’re willing to.

‘NO AD’ subscription for CDM!  Sign up here and support real investigative journalism and help save the republic!'